Hollow Earth Expedition RPG: After Action Report

A belated AAR for our Thrilling Action Stories! campaign, set in 1936 China. Our heroes have been, throughout the year, exploring and fighting to gain control of a collection of mellified men. They’ve had ups and downs, we’ve had an ancient prince in the body of a 100 year old female general of the White Lotus Rebellion, we’ve had Japanese villains, we’ve had gangsters, and the introduction of Hanoi Shan.

This all came to a head as the characters discovered that in the month or so they’d been gone, the White Lotus warrior-monks had moved the last two mellified men to a monastery outside of Chungking. They were in a race with Hanoi Shan’s Silk Mountain Triad, arriving in Chunking where they linked up with the local tong/KMT powers that be to try and raid the monastery.

They were attacked in a classic martial arts set piece — multi-leveled balconied restaurant — that lead to lots of chop-socky action — from gun fu moments to the classic using the hanging lanterns to swing from one level to the next, etc.

In the end, they had a company of Chinese soldiers to fight the Silk Mountain, who were using a semi-rigid airship painted to look like a dragon, to poison gas the monks. (We had a nice green smoke from the nostrils of the dragon moment. In the end, they were able to drop the airship with a recoilless rifle and recover the mellified men and a massive archive of historical and esoteric knowledge from the monks.

There’s one more episode in China before they repair to the United States for a few episodes…then I’m hoping to take them to Indochina for an episode or two to fight Hanoi Shan before returning to China to look for other relics. The timing should put them smack in the middle of the Battle of Shanghai and Rape of Nanking.